SXSW: Sights From Tech's Big Idea Party

The South by Southwest conference rolls serious ideas and innovations into a party package. Take a peek at the flavor of this eclectic Austin confab.

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The Lean Startup track, in its second year at SXSW, was one of the most popular tracks of the Interactive portion of the conference. There were consistently long lines out of each room, and many attendees were turned away because rooms were at capacity.

As with too many of the new kids, they have it bass-ackwords. Games are prep for real life. What they are really seeing is the application of real life to software. This is happening because we are hitting a point in computing power where the machine needs to conform to the user, where the computers to this point have been comparatively under powered so we had to adapt to them. Not really rocket science, but I'm glad that the nerds are seeing this.

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.